Hal Needham always had the top two or three buttons of his shirt undone, wore fancy tight jeans, preferred to have a cowboy hat on his head, hid his eyes behind tinted lenses, and at one time roomed with Burt Reynolds. He spoke with a twangy Southern drawl, never took himself seriously, broke nearly every bone in his body, and reshaped American culture without even trying very hard. Hundreds of things damn near killed him, but it was a short battle with cancer that finally took his life yesterday at the age of 82.

What Needham will be remembered most for is the first movie he directed, the ridiculously joyous, action-packed, and very funny Smokey and the Bandit. It was the second highest-grossing movie during 1977 (after Star Wars), a cultural touchstone for three generations of Americans, and the movie that sold a couple hundred thousand Pontiac Firebird Trans-Ams.

“I was down in Georgia with Burt doing . . . ah, what the hell was it?” he asked me during a phone interview back in 2007. “Gator?” I suggested. “You’re right, it was Gator. The driver captain brought some Coors beer down from out in California and, hell, I didn’t know it was illegal to sell Coors beer east of the Mississippi. Anyway, he came by and he said, ‘Hey, Hal, I put a couple of cases of Coors in your room.’ And I said, ‘Oh, thanks.’ Anyway I put it in my fridge and it kept disappearing. So I thought, ‘What the hell is going on?’ I set a trap and caught the maid stealing my Coors beer. So I asked her why and she said that, well, her boyfriend liked it and so on and so forth and then I realized you couldn’t take Coors beer east of the Mississippi. It would be bootlegging. So, anyway, I thought about it for a while and I said, ‘Hell, that’s a pretty premise for an action movie.’ And the rest is history.”

Born in Tennessee in 1931, Needham wandered through a few menial jobs and a stint as an Army paratrooper before heading to California in the mid-1950s to work in a tree-trimming outfit he co-owned. But it was his skills as a parachutist earned him his first movie job as a stuntman: performing as a wing walker in 1957’s The Spirit of St. Louis.

Notoriously fearless and ingenious, Needham soon became one of the most sought after and best paid stuntmen in the business. At a time when TV was overrun with westerns, he was known as one of the best horsemen around. He’d jump off practically anything, brought athleticism to barroom brawls and invented dozens of rigs and gadgets to make stunts look more spectacular. He did stunts for literally hundreds of TV episodes and dozens of movies. He was deeply respected in Hollywood, and consistently employed as a second unit director, long before he directed Smokey and the Bandit.

He was an innovator, two of his most impressive creations being the cannon roll and Shotmaker camera system. First used in the 1974 John Wayne film McQ, the cannon roll was designed to flip a car over without the use of a ramp. “We built a cannon 16 inches in diameter with inch-and-a-half-thick walls—because I knew what was going to happen inside that cannon—and welded it to the back floorboard behind the driver’s seat with the muzzle pointed toward the ground,” Needham explained to Ben Stewart of Popular Mechanics. That cannon was loaded with a three-foot section of telephone pole and a black-powder charge. “The idea was to throw the car in a broadside skid and hit that cannon.”

But after a static test had proven the formula inadequate for the task, the crew upped the powder charge—by far too much—for a rolling test with Needham driving. When Needham triggered the cannon at 55 mph, he soon found himself flying upside down at an altitude of 30 feet. He broke six ribs, his back, and punctured a lung. “The lesson I learned on this one,” he told Stewart, is that “powder squares itself in power.” Another stuntman used a lesser charge to actually perform the stunt in McQ.

The Shotmaker is a truck with a camera crane mounted to it and which can tow up to three cars behind. Using the crane to swoop down, over, and around the cars, directors suddenly had the ability to shoot vehicles from angles they never had before. In 1987 Needham and his co-inventor Williams Fredrick were awarded a Scientific and Engineering Oscar for the Shotmaker system. He demonstrated it in a 1990 promotional film for The Los Angeles Times.

Last year he became the second stuntman, after the storied Yakima Canutt, to win an honorary Oscar. Director Quentin Tarantino introduced him for the award in a shower of praise.

The success of Smokey and the Bandit and follow-up films like the autobiographical Hooper and The Cannonball Run (co-written with C/D’s own Brock Yates) enabled Needham to also pursue his interest in automobile racing. In 1979, Needham organized a land-speed record attempt in a three-wheel rocket car sponsored by Budweiser and driven by stuntman Stan Barrett. Although unsanctioned by the FIA (and therefore officially unrecognized), Needham’s team claimed to run 739.666 mph on California’s Muroc Dry Lake. That made it the first car to go faster than the speed of sound, albeit unofficially.

From 1981 to 1989, Needham and Reynolds co-owned the Skoal Bandit–sponsored number 33 car raced by Harry Gant in the NASCAR Winston Cup series. Over that time they won nine races, took 13 poles, and set a new standard for showbiz antics. That included the scantily clad “Bandettes” and hiring an actor to portray a voodoo witch doctor to put a hex on the competition. Going into the final race in 1984, Gant nearly had the championship won. “I can still hear Harry coming over the radio at Riverside and saying the engine blew,” Needham told ESPN the Magazine’s Ryan McGee in 2011. “And I still say my voodoo act had nothing to do with that.”

Needham, whose education didn’t extend beyond the eighth grade, never was a great director. And some of his films are downright awful. But he was an intuitive and smart filmmaker who knew how to entertain an audience even if that came at the expense of story structure or continuity. More important, though, his movies showed real affection for average Americans and the things they held dear. Things like muscle cars, beer, stuff that explodes, and watching Burt Reynolds show off.

Hal Needham never seemed to rest, and he was always better at mayhem than peace. So wishing him a peaceful rest seems inappropriate; let’s instead reflect on how few true legends walk among us, and how there’s now one fewer.